(A) Alternators
The alternator has its origins dating back as far as 1831 when Michael Faraday first performed experiments involving passing a magnet back and forth within a coil of wire to generate electrical current within the coil circuit by electromagnetic induction. Over the many years since then a multitude of alternator designs have been developed for a range of different applications. Nevertheless, the basic design of the alternator has not changed substantially. The wiring configuration of the coil around the stator may take a number of different forms and the rotor may have any number of magnetic poles and varying shapes but is nevertheless consistently assembled as a substantially integral unit with the drive shaft. The positioning of the rotor drive shaft within the alternator housing is fixed and defined by moving bearings such as ball bearings or needle or cased bearings that support the drive shaft on each side of the rotor within the alternator housing.
During development of a new and improved type of rotary engine, the substantial limitations of conventional alternator assembly became apparent. Not only can the conventional alternator assemblies not be disassembled with optimal ease and not only are they vulnerable to wear of the movable bearing components and associated parts but their overall construction delimited by the moveable bearings severely restricts the ability of the alternator unit to have anything other than a single rotor mounted to the alternator's drive shaft These unaddressed limitations of existing alternator design may even have been partly responsible for the motor industry's failure to overcome the low efficiency of alternator re-charging of car batteries that has hampered development of viable electrically powered vehicles.
(B) Rotary Internal Combustion Engine
It is widely appreciated that the conventional reciprocating piston internal combustion engine is an inefficient system. Despite the fact that they constitute by far the greatest majority of all present-day motor vehicle engines their efficiency is often rated to be as low as 20 to 25% in converting the fuel energy into work. This is in part due to the fact that in the four stroke cycle, only one of the four strokes delivers power, the remaining strokes for fuel intake, compression and exhaust of the combusted fuel do not deliver power. The firing of the other cylinders of the engine and momentum of the flywheel are necessary to keep the individual pistons moving during the other three strokes.
Beyond efficiency, further concerns are the cost, weight and complexity of the engine assembly and rate of wear of components and also subsidiary issues such as the extent of emission of environmental pollutants.
Whereas a number of different approaches to engine design have been investigated over the years, little has been published on designs of rotary internal combustion engines other than the famous Wankel engine invented in 1959 by German engineer Felix Wankel. The Wankel engine is based upon the use of a rotor mounted on a shaft to rotate within a housing, the rotor being adapted to sweep out an epitrochoidal or hypertrochoidal volume within the housing in order firstly to induct a fuel/air mixture into the housing to fill a combustion chamber between the rotor and the housing inner wall and to then compress it before combustion and the consequent movement of the rotor by the expanding gases to a position at which the combustion products are exhausted.
This design of rotary engine is apparently the only design that has had any substantial form of commercial acceptance. Nevertheless it is used in only a limited number of production cars and has been criticised for its relatively poor balance between fuel economy, performance and cost of manufacture.
The potential for rotary engine designs to improve on some or all of these characteristics and to better the conventional piston-based engines has not previously been fully realised and greater simplicity and efficiency may be achieved than heretofore.